CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — It’s colorful, it’s delicious, and it goes great with a nice cup of coffee in the mornings or before bed. We're talking about pan dulce, an important Mexican tradition that goes many years back.
Pan dulce, or sweet bread, was introduced in Mexico by the Spaniards in the 16th century, but it wouldn’t become popular until the mid 1800s with French influence. Centuries later, bakeries like Herrejon's Bakery can now create fifty kinds of different pan dulce breads.
"Each bread has its own process. There’s some that don’t take as long and there’s some that do because we have to let the yeast rise," owner of Herrejon's Bakery Cynthia Herrejon said.
Herrejon said their baking process is time consuming. Herrejon said some pan dulce's take as long as an hour and a half just to bake.
Once the bread rises, it's put in the oven for baking. After baking, some breads need to be sugared, but only while it's still hot. This is so that the sugar stays on the bread when customers make their way to the door ready with a tong in their hands.
Other types of pan dulce require glazing, which bakers have an entirely different process for.
"The pink cake, the barras de queso, that has to be done when it's cooled off," Herrejon said.
After each morning when the delicious pastries are ready at the crack of dawn looking for a plate to land on, the bakers at Herrejon's repeat the process over and over again until the last batch comes out of the oven.
"This is a culture that my husband brought from his home state and he loves to be here for the community, for the Hispanic community. We're happy to do this and welcome all nationalities, all sweet lovers, everyone. We're here," Herrejon said.
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